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DMandPenfold writes "A multi-billion dollar European Union IT research fund will help study the behavior of three-legged dogs, it has been revealed. The fund will support extensive studies into how three-legged dogs move. There is a particular focus on how the dogs balance and function, given their missing limb."

While this sounds excessive, it's only truly crazy to consider that after they convert euros to dollars to start the program they just have to convert them back to spend on the local expenses. Think how many more three legged dogs could benefit if only the researchers hadn't pissed away a good 20% in paying the exchange fees twice.

From the perspective of cognition this is very interesting stuff, in fact. As everyone knows, four-legged animals make use of multiple gaits: walking and cantering for example. These gaits are dynamic, and there is no such thing as an intermediate gait. Halfway between walking and cantering is called falling down. So an animal has to know how to accomplish a shift between gaits in mid-stride.

So there's already lots going on cognitively here, just with ordinary gaits. Now imagine that misfortune has struck and there is one less limb. What happens, not just kinematically but cognitively? Is the pattern for a preexisting gait reconfigured, or is there some degree of latent capability that wakes up?

Yes. My guess is that the "billions" is actually the funding for the organisation that has many projects, including one on damage compensating AI walking robots, which has a task involving looking at how animals cmpensate for lost limbs.

I think you mean typical media, not just typical slashdot. This is what the study is about, it should be inside the first paragraph, the methods the study uses (3-legged dogs) are much less important to the overall understanding of the subject and should be farther down. But then, that wouldn't make a sensationalist headline, so why would they want to do that.

Normally I'm all for studies that don't have any obvious near term benefit, but this is ridiculous. It's not a particularly useful set of studies to be making for the purposes of robotics, as a robot is going to be designed so as to not have that extra moment of inertia that 3 legged animals have to cope with. If you really want interesting useful stuff, the formerly quadrupeds that are now bipedal in nature are much more interesting in that respect.

Our Cairn Terrier pulled an Evel Knievel off the couch when he was 6 months old and broke his back left leg. He got an infection (and even with treatment)...and he had to lose the leg. I can tell you one thing - he is a fighter. I carried him outside the morning after his surgery and helped him stand so he could piss. He was up walking that afternoon...and I had to stop him from running up the stairs 3 days later.

Ours runs rip-shit-riot around the house and lives a wonderful life. He plays with other

Normally I'm all for studies that don't have any obvious near term benefit, but this is ridiculous. It's not a particularly useful set of studies to be making...

Well, one of the differences between the philosophical mind and the scientific mind is that the former loves to reason out conclusions a priori like you're doing above, whereas the latter likes to actually test things. It's impossible to say until after the study is done whether it will yield any useful results. There are good reasons to think it will, though, as the same neural processes are pretty much guaranteed in all mammals when it comes to how they going about reorganizing their locomotive systems.

Irony means writing the opposite of what you intend your reader to understand, so I'm at a loss to understand your post. Are you one of the "Americans that don't get irony" stereotypes? And this obviously isn't wasted money; it's looking into robotics applications.

For it to be a scientifically viable study, you pretty much have to cut legs off. 3 legged dogs are sufficiently unusual that depending upon the study you'd have to get before data on pretty much every dog in a country to get enough before and after information to make for a valid study. At which point you've pretty much negated the point of doing a study in the first place. Likewise if you wait until afterwards you're going to be dealing with data that's not scientifically valid as you don't know what it l

I just don't see what possible value that studying three-legged dogs to bring to the table. How to help leg-challenged horses?

How about as fodder for jokes?...

This traveling salesman is _way_ out in the hills and approaches a farmer to try to
sell his wares. He notices a three legged pig hopping around in the front yard and
asks the farmer about it.
"That's no ordinary pig!" exclaims the farmer. "That pig is smart! We all owe our lives
to that thar pig! Why, last winter we wuz all asleep and a spark

Obviously not all of the 1.3 billion USD (not actually "multi-billion" -- the Euro/Dollar conversion isn't that bad!) is going to research on "three-legged dogs". It's about robotic locomotion in general, of which that may be one component (although the project web site doesn't particularly mention it).

Also, it's a four-year project split between six universities. That's about $50 million per year for each site, which is still a big grant but doesn't seem so crazy for the field.

Most of the article focuses on 1 billion vs 3-legged dogs. Only the last paragraph mentions that a total of 16000 researchers will be funded. I'm quite sure some of the remaining 15995 are doing something useful or interesting too, but somehow they neglect to mention this.

A typical example of modern media hyping things up, a submitter that makes it even worse, and a Slashdot editor who thinks what the heck it's summer lets put it on the front page.

It used to be that The U.S. let the world in everything: steel production , electricity production, coal, silly government boondoggle projects, etc. Now we wake up one day and find that the Europeans are pulling ahead of us. leaving us in the dust in 3 leg dog research.Another sad note on the decline of our once great country.

As I understand it, mouse legs are shaped differently from dog legs. Correlating the study on mice against the study on dogs would help show how adaptations to limb reconfiguration differ with body proportion.

I had a rottweiler mix that lost his front left leg to osteosarcoma. At slow speeds, he would move kind of like an inchworm, hopping his remaining front leg forward, then jumping both back legs forward, wash, rinse, repeat. He could do it while keeping his head on the ground, say following a scent trail. At higher speeds (and even after the amputation he was faster than his brother) he would do a run in which his two right legs would move, then the remaining left rear would move. His head would bob up and down as he ran. Oh, and when he peed, he would lift his left rear leg, and balance on his two right feet. BTW, the cancer came back and got him a year after the amputation - bone cancer of the back left leg, and we didn't want to try him as a two legged dog, though I understand some of those get around as well.

It's hard to describe the device he was riding on, but it was like half a toy scooter with a harness. He seemed to be able to pull himself along with just his front legs, at least on a flattish surface.

I reckon injuries on the same side or opposite corners would be a bit of a bugger, though.

Some breeds such as German shepherds are very susceptible to arthritis and other joint problems. Some of them will effectively have the rear part of their bodies painfully seize up and not necessarily when they are in advanced years. Hence the harness wheel gizmo.
Sad really. The reason they get this in the first place is the years and years of inbreeding.

I wonder if there is interest in studying the adaptive phase of the subjects transfering between 4 to 3 legs. What effect does age of the subjects have? I hope they study the transition of gates on tread mill.

I would love access to this data and a peak at the models. Using Neural-nets? Evolutionary nets?

I imagine a 3 legged robot would be the most cost effective proposition system.

The implication that the EU is spending billions of euros on a program to study 3-legged dogs is completely misleading. The fund in question appears to be FP7 (Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]), which funds a huge variety of researchers on many differnet topics.

If you look at what I think is the relevant EU site [europa.eu], the
project received EUR 2.7 million from the 'Embodied intelligence' Initiative within the 'Information and communication technologies' (ICT) Thematic area of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Which wouldn't make much of a story I guess - "multi-billion" sounds waaay more impressive.

Indeed, the real story here (though not news by any means) is the inability of the British press to report on the EU without being willfully misleading. The headline "European £1bn IT programme to study three-legged dogs" is not strictly speaking false - it just fails to mention that that 1 billion will be used for many other things as well. A more reasonable article is here: European IT Research Gets €1.2 Billion From EU [pcworld.com].

"There is a particular focus on how the dogs balance and function, given their missing limb."
I'm not sure that giving the dog their missing will make any difference, and I don't think many three legged dogs still have their third leg sitting around...